Nautilus Magazine: The Ancient Rites That Gave Birth to Religion

Whitehouse’s fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. He developed a theory of religion based on the power of rituals to create social bonds and group identity. He saw that difficult rituals, like traumatic initiation rites, were often unforgettable and had the effect of fusing an individual’s identity with the group. Over the years Whitehouse’s theory of religiosity has sparked considerable debate and spawned several international conferences. [...]

When we can see how frequently certain kinds of rituals were performed, we think it’s possible to estimate—based on animal remains, for example—how often feasting events occurred. Some rituals involved killing large and dangerous animals. It’s been estimated that meat from a wild bull could feed 1,000 people. We can learn from burials, particularly in houses where burials are associated with founding events or closures. We can then estimate the frequency of particular rituals. The frequency of a ritual will be inversely proportional to the level of arousal it induces. Those inducers include sensory pageantry, singing, dancing, music, altered states of consciousness, and painful or traumatic procedures. We find that religions with high-frequency rituals will be more hierarchical than traditions that lack those rituals. [...]

Again, it really depends on what we mean by “religion.” I think the best way to answer that question is to try and figure out which cognitive capacities came first. We know that tool-use goes back deep in history. Homo habilis, otherwise known as handyman, is an early species that used tools, so it’s quite possible that he had some notion of creator beings. Language clearly plays an important role in some aspects of religion, like the development of a doctrinal system. But I’m not sure it’s necessary for many of the fundamental beliefs that undergird what we think of as religion. [...]

It may be a product of cultural evolution and the shift to much larger and more complex societies. When you use the singular “God,” you’re talking about some kind of high god, which probably means a god that’s omniscient and cares about the morality of our behavior and punishes us when we behave badly. That’s a relatively recent cultural innovation that may have been an adaptation to living in very large societies. [...]

That’s true, but the question is how we go about looking for meaning in the world. I personally don’t agree with the idea that the main explanation for religion is that we’re on a quest for meaning. I think we need to look at what participation in a particular cultural tradition—religious or otherwise—does for the individual and the community. There are lots of different components to religion. But if we’re just thinking about the ones that are universal, that seem to be part of our evolved psychology, I don’t think innate curiosity and desire to puzzle together the meaning of life explains religion.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Worth of an Angry God

Harvey Whitehouse, the director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, doesn’t think so. “Complex societies,” he and his colleagues declared in a March Nature paper, “precede moralizing gods throughout world history.” They relied on a massive historical database, called Seshat, which over a decade attracted contributions from over a hundred scholars. With the database “finally ready for analysis,” Whitehouse and his colleagues wrote in The Conversation, “we are poised to test a long list of theories about global history,” particularly “whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies,” some hallmarks of which are more economic integration and division of labor, more political hierarchy, the emergence of classes, and dependence on more complex technology and pre-specialists. Whitehouse concluded that those deities did no such driving. As he told Nautilus in a 2014 interview, as societies became more agricultural, what researchers see “in the archeological record is increasing frequency of collective rituals. This changes things psychologically and leads to more doctrinal kinds of religious systems, which are more recognizable when we look at world religions today.”

Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, sees it differently. He contends that moralizing gods spurred societal complexity because belief in moralizing gods leads to success in intergroup competition. It increased trust and cooperation among a growing population of relative strangers, he said, and buttressed traits like bravery in warfare. “The word ‘moralizing’ is not a useful term,” though, he added. “People use it casually, because people are interested in morality, but the theory specifies this very specific set of things that increase your success in intergroup competition. Most people want to call greater cooperation, helping strangers, things like that, moral. That’s just a Western preoccupation.” [...]

Forward bias is the idea that any time you look back in time to estimate the first appearance of a trait—when you have evidence of that trait—you say that the trait is actually older. For example, if we find evidence that humans had fire 200,000 years ago, we can be sure that, as a statistical fact, unless we think we found the actual first time anyone ever made a fire, that we’re finding it later than it actually appeared. So dates in archeology and history are always forward biased, at least statistically. One of the analyses we did was just to minimally correct for forward bias by moving back the smallest amount of time possible in the Seshat database, which is one century. When you push things back one century, it reverses the results. So rather than social complexity preceding moralizing gods, you get moralizing gods before the big increase in social complexity. [...]

The acceptance of atheists is the trailing figure on a bunch of trends, right? That same stack can be applied, for example, to having female and gay politicians—atheists are actually the lowest on that grouping. It seems clear that with the rise of strong secular institutions, representative governments, Western-style judicial processes, religion has become less and less important. And, in fact, one of the things our research shows is that it’s belief in a kind of punishing god that does a lot of the work of keeping people in line and policing people. What many Christians have today is a belief in this loving, kind God, who’s not much of a punisher. In fact, belief in Hell is on the decline. Ara Norenzayan has work showing that, if you believe God’s punishing and loving, you’re actually more likely to cheat. It’s the belief in Hell that seemed to do a lot of the work of keeping people in line.

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UnHerd: The fascist tendency sweeping the world

There is no single front. Instead, there are a dozen different points of fracture and crisis: cyber warfare and climate change are ushering in an unknown future; a new generation of technocratic power-holders such as Facebook and Amazon seem to be above the law and wield more influence than individual nation states; networks of vested interests (think of men such as Steve Bannon and Aaron Banks) are allegedly able to skew public opinion and sow political division. [...]

But ideology no longer offers certainty: we see such counter-intuitive overtures as Trump’s admiring comments about Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. We notice centrist and Left-leaning parties absorbing the concerns and kowtowing to the interests of the far-Right – such as their “admission” that immigration, multiculturalism and plurality of faith, heritage, colour, language and culture are to be interrogated and resisted instead of fostered. [...]

Brexit and Trump are a part of this new worrying world, but they are both signs of a broader tendency. It is suggested, by some, that the Brexit vote was racist and the 2016 US election result was propelled by misogyny against Clinton and a whitelash against Obama, and that both represent a self-righteous philistinism. But that would be to avoid the hard fact that some of the grievances which led to these results had been incubated by decades of under-investment in basic services, education, infrastructure and healthcare; by stalled social mobility, painful inequality and the destruction of workers’ rights, benefits and job security. [...]

My fear is that once Angela Merkel – the last grown-up in the room and a woman I admire for her stance on refuge and asylum – has left political life, we will not be able to turn things around. We will be over-powered by the fascist tendency. The signs are loud and clear: even where they have not ascended to outright power, the far-Right have made significant election gains across the world.

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UnHerd: Who broke the Left?

In the name of the free market, she trashed the long established infrastructure of care and civility that held us together as a country. Not since the Dissolution of the Monasteries has a whole pattern of social care been so thoroughly and successfully wiped away. In particular, she eviscerated northern working class towns, held together by mining and heavy industry, that were the heart of this country.

Second, my philosophical point: Mrs Thatcher wasn’t really a Conservative at all. She was a turbo-charged classical liberal who believed that the freedom of the individual, and most especially the economic freedom of the individual, trumped all other moral considerations. Setting people free from the state, setting people free to pursue their individual economic interests, this was her guiding idea. And so she took a sledgehammer to all those patterns of community living that held the individual back. To express her mistake philosophically, she confused ‘freedom from’ (any external constrains) with ‘freedom to’ (something that requires a whole social architecture of discipline and solidarity to enable people to flourish and live out their fullest lives). [...]

There are those who will argue the Labour Party had no choice. Its traditional power bases had been so weakened by the Thatcher revolution that it had to find new ways of drawing upon a wider constituency of support. Others, like me, think he sold the pass. And so the Labour party became an uneasy coalition of professional metropolitan liberals, media professionals, techies, academics, journalists; and socialists who looked back to a political philosophy embedded in the factory and more traditional patterns of communal life. [...]

The problem for Labour is that it now looks in two directions and it cannot make up its mind. Liberals face in one direction and Clause 4 socialists in another. The transfer of votes from Labour to the Liberal Democrats during the European Elections – including that of Alastair Campbell – demonstrates the natural affinity of new Labour with liberalism. The story of 20th and 21st Century politics is usually written up as the death of the liberal party after WW1. In 1935, George Dangerfield wrote the highly influential The Strange Death of Liberal England. But he read the rites far too early. Liberalism has decisively shaped both the Conservative and Labour parties. It became the enabling philosophy of late capitalism. And it gradually hollowed-out and replaced the original philosophies of the two great parties of the 20th Century: the conservatism of Conservatives and the socialism of Labour.

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Politico: Europe’s populists can’t be defeated — but they can be contained

Containment is about separating our assessment of the political reality from the outcome we morally desire. Today, the facts speak for themselves: Populists have seized more than a quarter of seats in the European Parliament and run governments representing more than a quarter of the (post-Brexit) EU population.

Support for populists is also far from fleeting. Hungary has had an illiberal government for almost a decade now. In France, Marine Le Pen’s nationalists, who came out ahead of the beleaguered French President Emmanuel Macron’s liberals, have posed a serious threat since the 2002 presidential election. Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which took power in 2015, trounced the opposition this weekend, with over 40 percent of the vote. And, one year into its government, Italy’s League is successfully eating up the support of the relatively more moderate 5Star movement and shows no signs of slowing down. [...]

In practice, we should waste no opportunity to up the cost of illiberal politics, but we need to do so selectively and proportionally. The EU’s decision to open Article 7 proceedings against Poland and Hungary for breaches in the rule of law set a positive example. To be sure, the Commission may not have the votes in the European Council to enforce sanctions against either government. But that does not render these measures meaningless. The proceedings have sent a clear signal to Hungarian and Polish societies and weakened the legitimacy of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the leader of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński. [...]

There are signs that the paradoxes inherent in right-wing populism are even more startling than those of Soviet communism. You cannot “keep migrants out” and pay for the growing number of pensioners. As a mid-sized nation-state, you cannot both “take back control” and strengthen your position in the global economy. You cannot make government more accountable to “the people” at the same time as you destroy independent institutions. And you cannot build an innovative economy while stifling critical thinking.

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The Atlantic: Modi's New Challenge Is Embracing Urbanization

Five years later, the BJP has secured a new electoral mandate even more impressive than the last, a testament to Modi’s unmatched political prowess. Yet it has done so despite an economic record that can be described only as underwhelming. If Modi hopes to do more than simply stay in power, if he still aspires to bring his new India to life, he’d do well to heed the advice of a small clique of economists who’ve been calling on his government to more fully embrace urbanization. [...]

Modi and his advisers quickly came to understand that a combination of depressed demand in the mature market democracies and robust competition from other low-wage countries had essentially foreclosed the export-driven model of development, as Amy Kazmin and Lionel Barber report in the Financial Times. Instead, Modi reached for a grab bag of reforms and public investment, an approach one of his advisers described as “light many fires at once—to see if any of them would catch.” Modi’s policy mix has indeed succeeded in lighting many fires, though not all of them are burning quite as he might have wished. [...]

But all the latrines in the world won’t make India an economic dynamo. To pull off that feat, Modi must persuade Indians to embrace an urban future. Reuben Abraham and Pritika Hingorani, both of India’s IDFC Institute, a small but enormously influential think tank based in Mumbai, have made a convincing case that at present India’s state governments—which are each empowered to decide what qualifies as urban—systematically underestimate the urban share of their populations. According to the Indian Census, only 31 percent of the country’s population resides in urban areas. If, however, you were to adopt Ghana’s or Lebanon’s definition for what amounts to an urban area, India is almost 50 percent urbanized.

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The Atlantic: What to Make of the European Elections

This narrative points to some important facts. Far-right populists had a disappointing night in a number of big countries, including Germany and Spain. Their advance slowed or went into reverse in a few smaller countries where they once looked as though they could pose a real threat, including Denmark and the Netherlands. And though their overall ranks have swelled, they are in no position to take down the European Union anytime soon. [...]

The results in Italy were especially striking. By engaging in ever more extreme demagoguery against immigrants, Matteo Salvini has transformed the Northern League, a small separatist party fighting for northern independence, into the dominant force in national politics. When he entered government last year, his party was the junior coalition partner to the Five Stars, a populist movement with roots in the political left. Now he has eclipsed his rivals, winning six times as many votes as he did five years ago, and twice as many as he did last year. In the process, he has cemented his position as the likely next prime minister—and radically transformed Italy’s political geography. [...]

It’s tempting to imagine that some of the progressive parties that are now in the ascendant across Europe might be able to stem the right-wing tide. As they have shed the radicalism of their founding period, the Greens have, for example, become ever more popular in Germany. Five years ago, they took 11 percent of the vote, finishing third. This time around, they doubled their share of the vote, comfortably taking second place. For the first time in history, they have beaten Germany’s Social Democrats in a nationwide election. And Germany’s Greens are part of a wider trend: Their sister parties also posted significant gains in France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, liberal parties, which tend to pursue more pro-market policies but have similar views on many social issues, performed strongly in Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia. [...]

Traditional parties have disappointed too many people, too many times. The Greens and the liberals speak a different language, directed at a different audience. For now, only Salvini directly addresses the disenchanted voters of the Monte Amiata. Unless that changes, he may be able to count on their support for many years to come.

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Social Europe: The Euro-elections in microcosm: Macron versus Le Pen

Macron himself made of his campaign an existential struggle between his La République en Marche (LREM) party and Marine Le Pen’s nationalist and Eurosceptic Rassemblement National (RN).

Towards the end of the campaign, he raised the stakes by personally getting engaged and emphasising how important this election was for him. In an interview with regional media, Macron said: ‘The transformation project I am leading for the country does not go ahead without a new stage in the European project. The French people elected me for that.’ For him, these European elections could be summed up in one question: ‘Do we want division when facing the United States and China, or do we prefer unity to build our European future?’ [...]

European elections are very often used to protest against parties in government and it is not a surprise when these come in second or third in European polls. Considering the gilets jaunes movement, the weekly protests and the drop in Macron’s ratings in recent months, LREM is probably glad that it maintained this level of support. In fact, the Élysée has already suggested that it does not intend to backtrack on its policies and that it will enter the ‘second act’ of Macron’s term with the same determination.

Third place went to the Greens’ list, with 13.5 per cent. Domestically, the results show a consolidation of the changes to the French political landscape that emerged in 2017. The system now focuses on LREM and RN, rather than the centre-right Republicans and centre-left Socialists—they ended in fourth and sixth place respectively.

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Slate: New Hampshire Legislature Overrides Veto, Abolishes Death Penalty

The New Hampshire Legislature repealed capital punishment on Thursday, becoming the last state in New England to abolish the practice. Twenty other states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have also eliminated the death penalty. In two more states, California and Pennsylvania, the governor has imposed a moratorium on executions. Even as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority makes capital punishment easier to carry out, states seem to be moving away from executions, leaving America’s broken death penalty system to collapse under its own weight. [...]

In May, however, the House overrode Sununu’s veto after a handful of Republicans bucked the governor to vote with Democrats. And on Thursday, the Senate followed suit, with four Republicans (Senators Bob Guida, Harold French, John Reagan, and Ruth Ward) joining Democrats to abolish the practice by a vetoproof two-thirds vote. The bipartisan vote converts the maximum penalty in New Hampshire to life in prison without parole. Sununu issued a statement decrying the override and stating that he was “incredibly disappointed.”

New Hampshire has not executed a prisoner since 1939 and has no death chamber. There is, however, one individual on its death row: Michael Addison, who was convicted of killing a police officer in 2008. The repeal bill does not formally convert Addison’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. But criminal justice advocates expect the state judiciary to convert Addison’s sentence now that the death penalty has been abolished. In 2015, the Connecticut Supreme Court converted remaining death row inmates’ sentences to life imprisonment after the Legislature repealed capital punishment. It seems likely that the New Hampshire Supreme Court will do the same for Addison. (The state Constitution prohibits “cruel or unusual punishments,” and it is difficult to see how a punishment that cannot be applied today could be lawfully carried out against past offenders.)

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